Apple Tried Charging the Price of a New MacBook Pro for a Screen Replacement
luketully.ca
luketully.ca
Apple uses a lot of customer hostile behaviors nowadays. Recently:
* I canceled the Apple TV+ year trial that came with my iPhone. While, I believe, they require other apps to allow access until the trial ends, they ended my access immediately.
* Apple Music pulls up a slow interstitial almost every time I open it up to try to get me to pay. I have like 4 albums on my phone I listen to, it’s incredibly annoying how they’ve broken the music app to upsell their services.
I’m trying to get rid of most of my Apple devices in favor of anything else at this point.
I even heard in some part of the world Apple started to paid commission to Apple Retail Staff for products sales. ( They used to pride themselves the lack of conflict of interest and to provide the best services possible )
Seeing reports about old laptops breaking from the same, I suppose the upside is that they are becoming less fragile.
It was the best tech support experience I've had in my life.
Jobs was one of a kind.
edited for clarity.
Vehicle breaks, the part or component that fixes it is unavailable/backordered/allocated for months+.
Manufacturers will offer to buy back the vehicle, at original sale price, rather than force you to wait (and relieving them from having to provide a loaner/rental).
Their staff are more empowered than most companies though. Usually I’m able to get what I want with a minimum of fuss, you just need to go in person and be very calm.
I don't think it's fair to criticise a paid product for asking for you to pay for it.
Maybe check out PinePhone if you're interested in hacking something together!
The problem is barely Google. The problem are the Apps you download and giving full permissions.
But can’t those basically be considered part of the operating system at this point? I can’t disable Apple frameworks on my iPhone either. Mind, iOS of course does less user tracking.
That's exactly why I switched because the idea that I can't disable Play Services is bonkers. It does look like MicroG (open-source replacement) is maturing a lot recently though!
> I can’t disable Apple frameworks on my iPhone either. Mind, iOS of course does less user tracking.
Apple makes their money up front by me purchasing the device. That's why they're expensive. They are a hardware company.
Whenever you use an iOS feature for the first time, you are prompted with a privacy policy statement that is presented in both a summary and a long form to be read before you click agree. And they have an icon that they show you whenever data will leave your device.
With them being the forward about it, I trust it way more.
If you don't believe me, go and read this[0] privacy policy on (arguably) the creepiest feature that Apple provides you (Siri).
Some quotes from it:
> Siri Data is associated with a random, device generated identifier. This random identifier is not linked to your Apple ID, email address, or other data Apple may have from your use of other Apple services.
> Siri Data and your requests are not used to build a marketing profile, and are never sold to anyone.
That immediately hits me differently from Google's policy (I read it a long while ago now), and it makes me view Apple with enough of a positive light to make the ecosystem jump.
Apple also charges 30% of much of your software and content purchases, and the hardest isn't particularly expensive relative to similar competitor hardware.
Ah, yeah. That's a good point!
> the hardest(hardware) isn't particularly expensive relative to similar competitor hardware.
Their margins are higher though because they are more vertically integrated. Especially on the higher end phones, they make serious $
so what /e/ is doing is essentially an audit of android, and an attempt to remove everything that is of concern.
it's a major project, and it's not complete. work in progress.
I have a Pinephone and hope that sooner then later that I can use it full time.
The YouTube Music app is not that bad, but definitely missing a feature or three that I used a lot on Play. It also seems to need to be manually started every time my phone connects to Bluetooth whereas Play would start automatically if it was the last thing that was playing on that BT connection.
I switched to Spotify and I'm glad I did.
Understandable, if Apple's claim on Privacy is to be trusted, then it does seem to be a better alternative to android when it comes to privacy; But for a power user android ecosystem offers more without rooting, is not dependent upon 'trust on a company alone' and there's no separate power-user level ecosystem for iOS without jailbreaking.
e.g.
• AOSP, so there's LineageOS as aftermarket alternative, /e/ with e foundation phone or Fairphone, dozens of other alternatives.
• Firewall VPN for android are more refined e.g. Netguard (open-source) even allows selective blocking of connections per address/ per app; this is the closest thing to Little Snitch on macOS.
• Tasker allows automation to such an extent that, several things which required writing apps can now be performed by creating tasks. Tasker is Siri shortcuts on steroids without Siri.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
So if you use their cloud services, both Apple and Google have access to your photos, but Apple has access to all of your whatsapp and signal conversations, while Google does not (if you decide to password protect your backups).
And you have to use iCloud if you want to keep your 3rd party chat history safe, unless you jailbreak to extract it from the file system.
iMessage is of course purposefully flawed to allow for MITM.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...
I would love to know how many subscribers of Google Music have they lost during this transition to YouTube music. Not that I think Google actually cares, and seeing how big companies BS themselves from inside, they probably sooth themselves with "it is temporary", "we will catch up on features", "they will come back".
With Apple One now being announced, I am investigating if I can move everything there, but keep my Android phone for now.
Now, the constant nagging? That’s annoying.
Nowadays? Apple has been doing anti-consumer behavior for multiple decades. I remember only allowing purchased itunes music being exported in their specific format.
You'd have to burn them to a CD and rip it back to a useable format.
This isn't new, any educated consumer is well aware of how Apple plays.
Maybe you're thinking of the DRM'd files that couldn't be played back by other players, and even iTunes on other computers without your iTunes store account. In that case indeed burning a CD and ripping it would be one solution. They stopped selling DRM'd files completely by 2009, though.
But yep that's how we bypassed it.
I think I bought 6 songs before I found a better alternative. Reminds me how I had 1 iphone (6) and would never get one again.
I agree they are annoying.
Should fix the stupid interstitial
It's obvious that there is a bug in the code, I get the interstitial at random times, not only when I open the app. Wifi drops and then comes back? Interstitial right on top of whatever I was reading...
PS, am I the only person that puts a "cancel free trial for XYZ" in my calendar the minute I sign up for anything?
So much so, I have an "Add expiration reminder" iOS shortcut. Pretty sure I downloaded it from the Shortcuts gallery or something, it doesn't look like something I'd write.
I think that's w.r.t personal experience, but they've been doing that for a very long time.
Remember the time Jobs told that we are holding the phone wrong?
Geoffrey Moore’s “Inside the Tornado” makes an argument that companies deliberately need to become less customer focused when they’re in hyper growth mainstream adoption.
But, Amazon doesn't seem to have done that. Someone even claimed Amazon sells customer service, they still seem to do so but at the expense of their employees.
Thanks for the recommendation of the book.
Apple Music pop-ups are annoying, but I only saw them after some iOS version updates. There's also a setting to hide Apple Music features completely.
There is one rule for Apple, and one rule for everyone else.
Tim Cook's Apple is more than happy to use the abusive customer-hostile patterns they deny others.
Weird considering that the AirPods are not repairable. They just replace them.
I often sign up for trials and immediately cancel (so I don't forget about them). That way it requires a positive action on my part to keep the subscription. That doesn't work if your access ends as soon as you cancel.
AirPods are made of three components: left earbud, right earbud, and charging case. More granular repairs are neither offered nor possible due to glues and so forth, though damaged parts can be recycled for scrap. So repairs can only replace those three parts in total, and perform no other purpose. This is still useful if you lose an earbud on the subway, or if your charging case lid snaps off, but it opens the door for an exploit as well.
If you have a set of AirPods and you want to jump the line at Apple to buy another set and sell them to someone else, you can simply 'lose' each piece of your set of AirPods. Once you have a complete set of all three parts, you can assemble a fully standalone AirPods and sell it, using the parts that you got from repair.
To prevent this, repair sets their prices for the individual parts to exceed the final unit price of the whole. This isn't a big deal if you damage one part only
Repair costs probably also include 'expedited priority' versus those purchasing new products for the first time, so if there was a waiting list of 4-6 weeks to buy new AirPods, repair's full replacement price would bypass that list and get you your replacements immediately.
They still should have told you on the phone that the repair cost exceeds the repurchase cost and offered to discount the price in exchange for whatever the current wait is for folks buying them on the website.
Also, aren't waiting lists usually due to manufacturing latency? Not arbitrary delays that can be bypassed via purchasing repairs? Moreover, no one can assemble a Macbook/iPad/iPhone by ordering replacement parts. Your example only holds good for Airpods.
I know iTunes never got a great rep but it worked, and iTunes Match was fantastic. Now however they still charge for it, except its totally broken unless you instead pay for Apple Music (9.99/mo instead of 24.99/year).
Annoyed but there really isn’t much alternative on that front.
She accepted the trial, then went into settings to cancel the subscription so she wouldn’t be automatically charged at the end of 3 months.
With no warning, the subscription was then completely cancelled with no ability to use the rest of the trial. (Unlike some other Apple trials.) When asking Apple Support about this, they referenced an obscure sentence in their terms and conditions. They could do nothing to re-offer the trial to my wife. So consumer hostile.
I brought it to the Apple store and explained that I had tried everything possible to resolve the issue without opening up the laptop myself, such as resetting NVRAM, completely reinstalling macOS completely, etc. I explained that I think that the ribbon cable is simply faulty and that it probably just needed a replacement. The Genius said that they're going to bring it in the back to do every single one of the things I mentioned that I already did.
I come back 4 hours later to pickup my laptop and they tell me that the issue is the motherboard and that replacing said board would cost $800. I asked how they determined it was the motherboard and not simply a faulty ribbon cable to the trackpad, but they wouldn't answer the question directly. After requesting their superior and restating my question a few more times, they told me that they don't have access to replacement ribbon cables and that my only option was a motherboard replacement, which itself would take about a week because they needed to order the board. That was enough for me to take my laptop and leave, even though they still didn't answer the actual question of how they determined what the actual issue was or even confirm my hunch that the issue was with the ribbon cable.
I bought a $5 replacement cable from Amazon, took about 10 minutes to swap it out using an iFixIt tutorial, and I'm still using that laptop as my main machine years later. In other words, they spent 4 hours to quote me an $800 fix that would take about a week to be done for something that was actually only a $5 fix that would take no more than 30 minutes. I've been hesitating to buy a new laptop for years because of that experience as well as the downhill quality of MacBooks as of late, such as the keyboard (although fixed now), touch bar, initial Catalina bugginess, etc.
Another friend had his motherboard replaced because he had the common issue with the old keyboard where keys would randomly stop working. Of course it didn't fix it, only wasted a month of his time. Luckily his was still covered under warranty and they managed to get it right and replace the keyboard the second time around.
People who are technical like you, or myself, and attempt to fix things, and often know more than techs, it's frustrating.
But consider how many people come in that don't do those things, or don't do them but said they did, etc.
Honestly, often times when a coworker of mine is checking an issue I'm having, the issue is a minor one that I somehow missed.
My local Apple Store sent the phone to the repair facility 3 times but it always came back with the comment "Couldn't replicate issue" although the issue was clearly documented and reproducible by me and the Apple support staff.
After a lot of phone calls, email back and forth, the manager of my local Apple Store said there's nothing they can do about it, the only option that I have left is to trade-in the defective device to get a gift card and then use it to buy a new iPhone 11. Since I need a iPhone for my job (software-testing), that's what I did. I was tired to fight for my right to get a replacement device or a repair.
It's completely ridiculous. Apple's "warranty" is basically useless. But somehow they can get away with it.
Completely anecdotal I know, but I had a Apple Pencil fail on me outside of warranty. On the phone they refused to fix or replace it. Once I mentioned my consumer rights (which cover 6 years in Ireland https://www.apple.com/ie/legal/statutory-warranty/ - I'm sure it's similar in Germany) they put me through to a separate phone line and sent me out a new pencil.
In Germany, it's 2 years of statutory warranty (Gewährleistung), but there's a shift in the burden of proof (Beweislastumkehr) after 6 months, so if the retailer insists, it's up to you to prove that a defect was actually present when you bought the item.
We talk a lot about the throwaway society and about planned obsolence, but six years of statutory warranty could actually change something.
I phoned AppleCare, they made me jump to all the standard hoops (factory reset, etc) to ensure it's not a software issue. Problem persisted so they scheduled a pick-up. Next day, UPS picked up the iPad, it arrived at the service center the day after and the status went to diagnosed and replacement shipped within the hour. Had the replacement iPad in my hands the next day.
So you can just undo your purchase and get a full refund. And then, if you want to give them a 2nd try, you could use that money to purchase a new identical phone.
https://www.it-recht-kanzlei.de/Thema/gewaehrleistung-maenge...
All three times they've just confirmed the issue in store, entered the device into their system, then gone into the back to get a replacement device.
Purely anecdotal I know, but it's odd how much it seems to differ from country to country.
Independent repair stores now cannot get Apple parts anywhere, so your only repair option in many cases is to take the thing to Apple and pay the predictably just-below-used price to get it repaired.
And even if you do, what can you do about it? Switch to another company? [1]
The amount of effort that I need spend just to fight only _some_ of the unethical behavior in my area of expertise is already high. Just imagine the issues in other fields which I don't know about.
[1]: https://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/000/618/221/47...
Or the reality is most people don't care as long as they can check instagram and open tiktok.
What is more likely?
We constantly get anecdotes on here like this post, Yet everyone I know who has a mac never has any of these troubles, or if they do apple takes relative care of them. My mom's macbook still kicks after 10 years. The only issue which I saw a friend have was the keyboard debacle. Other than that, I never hear of these situations.
What are the actual numbers?
Apple is also putting up a very poor "training" program (Independent Repair Program) so that it looks like they're entertaining "right to repair" while they ensure the program is not adequate enough for people taking the course to handle even the most basic repairs.
Apple also locks it all up in tight NDAs so that they can't discuss this publicly.
Most of my apple devices have lived far past their life. Now maybe in 10 years I look back to this time and say that is no longer true, but I have multiple 10 year + old pieces of apple hardware that still function remarkably well.
https://images7.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED127/56473bf64a6...
Took it to an Apple store and was quoted £700 to fix it which is equivalent to almost half the cost of the laptop. For a single key. Absolute insanity.
Just complaining about it doesn't get you very far as long as you still keep shoving money in their pocket.
These days there are plenty of quality alternatives that are not Apple and lowering their sales should send a clear message to their board.
But yes we can also strive towards both goals simultaneously. I personally will never spend any money on Apple's products. I've inherited a few of them, but I keep myself as loosely tied to the ecosystem as possible.
I always see the suggestion to vote with your wallet but how does it even work with a product with usable lifecycle of 5 or even 10 years? By the end of 2025 Apple will see a sales slowdown over the past few years. At that point I'm not sure it's even possible to pinpoint specific reasons, like "customer couldn't replace keycap on a 2017 model computer" which may or may not have been solved for years already.
If you have complaints and you want them to be fixed, tell them (https://www.apple.com/feedback/), unless you've given up completely on the company and won't ever return to it. Simply voting with your wallet is the equivalent of ghosting in commerce.
I've had this happen to me, although I argued (successfully) that the keyboard was defective and I was trying to repair a stuck key (this was the previous butterfly mechanism) and they did a replacement under AppleCare.
The tech even told me that replacing keycaps on the butterfly keyboards is extremely challenging, and even they break the keys sometimes.
I ended up buying a broken keyboard from eBay for $80 and picked the keys off that I wanted, then re-sold it on eBay for $60.
(this was before they announced the keyboard replacement program)
Times have changed. :(
Edit: currency is not American
Lol, why? I have expensive keyboards and they are nowhere near that much for a single key. Is there any other keyboard on the planet that has such expensive keys (except maybe that one with OLEDs on every key)?
What are they sprinkling these things with to make people parrot such tripe?
Makes sense? No. Costs more than £70? Yes.
The Apple repair confirmation email has two items listed, £290.83 for the case, £69 for repairs. It's £0.00 to pay because it's covered by Apple.
Other people in this thread are saying they have done DIY single key replacements... but maybe it was on models that weren't the butterfly keyboard?
Do I understand right that the "butterfly keyboard" is actually no longer used in the new 2020 models, it was abandoned by Apple? [1] It does seem to have been a mistake all around.
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/guide/butterfly-keyboard-vs-scisso...
I could go on and on with such examples and I can't believe that people pay so much money and don't see a problem here. I never had any major problems with any devices I use and they all cost several times less than Apple equivalent.
The keyboard thing was a real (and sucky) problem that Apple should not have let go on as long as they did. But the very small number of problems I've had through the years of using Macs, iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, AirPods, iPods, etc. gives me an overall good impression of their products.
Apple's customer satisfaction rating is industry-leading: https://www.theacsi.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=ar...
This was also my first problem with Apple after 6 years of using different products. So I can tag it to bad luck. If I was having these problems with every device, I'd definitely move to something else.
AFAICT the two main alternatives are a Windows Laptop and a Linux Laptop. Each of them with their own _ton_ of problems.
iPad mini 1 - 8 years, my mom uses it for videos, facetime, reading. Still works fine.
Airpods are great.
Macbook pro 2017 - 3 years of use, works perfectly. Keyboard had its issues - had replaced it for free this year, wanted to replace a battery - they found some kind of defect there and replaced for free.
So yeah, I haven's seen anything even close to this kind of reliability and customer support. That is why when time comes I will continue to use Apple.
Before that I was a long time Android and Windows laptop user.
For a lot of professional people it's mostly a matter of time vs cost. I am a developer, mostly working with ruby & python these days. What my options are? Mac, Windows and Linux.
Let's sum it down:
- Windows. Took them like 20 years to figure out how to make a working Terminal so no, really not a good candidate for people like me. I am glad they are catching up, but who knows when they will get stuck for 20 years on another important piece (not to mention their WSL is a prerequisite for a lot of work, and basically a VM)
- Linux. Good on paper but man, it's such a time sink. Dependency hell: you want to upgrade your httpd so you must upgrade 175+ other packages, one of which will break something. UI: clumsy but works if you have little expectations. Hardware: A mess, sleep never works, gfx performance is silly, at the end of the day mostly closed-source stuff that companies do not care about making it unreliable at best.
- Mac: Expensive? Kinda, yes, but not that much if you compare to similar hardware from other vendors (ie. Dell) assuming you do not compare apples to oranges (same cpu, same general performance, same form factor & quality). Does it break? Yes it does and it sucks. It shouldn't - not for that price, not for environmental reasons since they try to be so "green". Had my issues with Apple hardware more than once, but thank god they were not as serious as this.
Saying that linux is a good replacement for mac is like saying that k8s is good for everyone. Yes, you can deploy your blog on k8s but it will cost you a lot of time & energy. Same with linux - yes, I can work on linux, but its just sooo much faster and cheaper for me to just go and buy another MBP if my current one were to break. Some people (me) still like to play with k8s, others like to dig into linux stuff (not me).
What I am angry about with Apple is how they approach their failures rather than the failures themselves. I can understand mistakes that you cannot do anything about - famous iPhone 4 antena. They made tens of millions of devices that have an issue with antena in some edge conditions, well, shit happens, what can you do - it's not like they are going to replace all of them.
But MBP keyboards? Giving 4 years of free replacements is not the solution, a solution would be to create a replacement keyboard that would not break - and use that each time it gets replaced. Because 4 years old MBP is still a great machine that can do what's it supposed to very well, there is no reason to trash it.
If there were a law to force manufacturers to repair known defects (examples like that keyboard, screen laminate etc) for at least 10+ years, I would be first to vote for it. It's way to common for things to break after a couple years, things that could - and should - work for much more. And this is what I'd expect from companies like Apple, which would justify their green PR and prices bullshit.
Which is something more or less impossible on the other systems you have mentioned.
On macOS, I can easily upgrade my nginx homebrew package, (same with httpd) each of them have like 2 dependencies and I don't think I ever had a conflict when doing so. Granted, not easy on windows, but see my comment about terminal ;-)
If you want to use latest packages at all, you can use distro like Arch Linux, Gentoo, or etc.
Normal distros like Ubuntu and RHEL don't upgrade packages because of stability. If you use these distros but need latest software, you can use LinuxBrew (it seems that it's merged to Homebrew) to install latest software, or use Docker.
Anyway it's not pros for Mac but pros for Homebrew and it's also available on Linux. OTOH stable and secure macOS environment with many packages like Ubuntu, RHEL is difficult.
Apple is the most expensive but also the least... bad.
Android is fine I guess. I still prefer iPhones. They have a much nicer app experience. Android feels subpar and inconsistent.
Windows... is just awful. I deal with Windows every day on machines much faster than my macbook and it’s just slow. Opening Explorer randomly slow. Settings that are randomly forgotten. Sound and network settings spread out over 5 config screens. One laggy app can easily make the whole system feel unresponsive. Oh, and “this file cannot be opened because it is in use by another program”. Thanks. What program? I dunno.
Huge progress has been made on consolidating settings in the last couple years, unfortunately that means everyone is unhappy right now because old settings are constantly being moved to more consistent locations but you still need to know both the old and new ways.
I just took my almost three year old iPhone X in for an expanding battery, first real issue I've had with any of my iPhone's since I went snorkling with my iPhone 4. Since I didn't buy the extended warranty, they charged me $89CDN for the repair. Turns out they can't repair the battery, so I got a new iPhone X. Oh, that phone I snorkled with, they COMPED because I'm a good customer.
For my current mbp, (the one used in the comparison) I only have it because my late 2013 model was stolen, and needed a new machine quickly. Then I got the 2018 fn key 13" which I was forced to first replace the screen on, then the logic board, then the entire computer under warranty. They gave me the 2019 model as a replacement.
A cracked display in a MBA retina 13in 2019 cost the customer $489.94 total.
You might want to call back and mention the delamination repair program. If you're still within the 4 year purchase period it should be fixed for free.
That was a tier 4 repair, which the indie Apple authorized repair shop described to me as the repair category for catastrophic damage and basically just a little less than the full replacement cost.
It was a three month old laptop and so I paid the fee, as it was like $150 less than the original cost of the machine and I would’ve had to buy a new one otherwise anyway.
I was a little beat up from the fall and needed a few stitches in my hand, luckily the ER didn’t also deem that to be a tier 4 repair.
But his 2015 MBP delamination is covered by an Apple Recall from many years ago! He doesn't have to pay a dime to get that issue fixed.
I first took my 2015 MBP to Apple a few years ago for the delamination problem and was told it was covered under a recall notice, but at the time I didn't have up to 2 weeks of service time to be without my MBP, so I just dealt with it. This Spring I finally called up Apple and told them I wanted to get my delamination issue fixed. The Apple rep was completely lost about the recall I was talking about, but about 15 minutes of looking around he found the recall information. 1 week later I had my MBP back from the service center looking b-e-a-utiful :)
Oddly, in the interaction with customer support I posted, there is one comment missing, and that's where the rep says the laptop is outsode the repair window (4 years).
On my personal machine, I used the repair program multiple times because the screens are just so vulnerable to delamination and damage.
To elaborate, when I experienced the issue on my machine in 2018, I also couldn't let them ship it out for a week. I believe they made a note on my file, which worked out in the end, but no subsequent technicians were able to rely on that note and had to do their own inspection
You also have an option of just removing the anti-reflective coating using solvents like 90% ISO or stronger.
But if you read the transcript, it's the exact opposite. The rep warned them the repair would cost more than a replacement before he even quoted them a price, and tried multiple times to explain why. He acted completely professionally, and the situation itself is totally unremarkable too.
Likewise, though I didn't mention this in the post, the first few emails Joe sent were not quotes, but payment requests with no further detail as to what was happening. I've gone ahead and updated the post.
In certain models you simply cannot plug another ( Apple original ) screen, it will not work. Also many "regular/mundane" chips are not available to anyone but Apple.
Apple not only doesn't support any repair initiative, it actively sabotages anything they see as a threat. Their Authorized Service Provider Program is a complete joke done in a way to keep other people busy but set for failure and to give Apple lawyers some leverage they can work with.
it's also easy to understand -- there's no generation gap. Unlike privacy, the harms are immediate and most people have experienced them.
repair.org is IMO doing as much good as EFF / ACLU on a way thinner budget
The point is that that's what you had (admittedly on a much smaller scale) in the US, but that it's now disappearing, seemingly in response to the push for Right to Repair. Watch his latest video.
Other than that, my impression of Thinkpads is that, while they seem a bit clunky for me, they are at least in the top tier of non-MBP laptops. Likewise, my brother just picked up a 2019 XPS 13" which has earned some praise from HN folk and seems to be pretty solid. I'd personally like a gaming rig of some kind, but if I'm realistic, I won't get that much use out of it until the rainy season.
The cost of repair is calculated to be just below, or at, the cost of replacement. It's unusual, but not unheard-of, to have it more than the cost of replacement.
I've encountered this with TVs, phones, VCRs, stereos, non-Apple computers, cars, and I have heard stories of this applying to buildings and homes, as well.
And I find that infuriating, as it leads to waste.
I recently repaired a Sony soundbar system for about 30% of the purchase price, so definitely not "at the cost of replacement". Replaced a phone screen for 10% the cost of a new one etc.
Today, I'm returning a leased car. I had a small crack in the front bumper (trailer hitch in a parking lot). It isn't one of the new sensor-packed bumpers; just a vanilla one.
It cost $1,000 to repair, because they replaced the entire front bumper, and the paint cost more than the part.
It also had to be done at the dealer, because of the lease requirements. The body shop down the road would have done it for half that. I have since found out that the dealer sends the car to a body shop anyway, and they probably only charged half, so the dealer pocketed the difference.
I am never leasing a vehicle, ever again. This was my first, and last time.
All in all, it was quite cheap. I probably saved a lot of money, but I don’t like surprises. I’ll gladly pay more, for no surprises.
I foresee a future Black Mirror episode about Apple Home: $1m for a $250k condo. When the fridge breaks that’s gonna cost you $990k to repair. Might as well just buy a whole new home.
In one case, I had a laptop that developed a few, simultaneous problems. It had the notorious "stickyyyy keyyyyyyboard" issue, as well as a loose Thunderbolt port, and issues with the EFI system.
They basically replaced the entire computer. The only thing that didn't change was the screen.
Since it was under warranty, it didn't cost me a dime, but the report said it was about two grand's worth of repairs.
It had started having an issue (condensation) after 3-4 years of use and apparently the part number was from a run that could display was issue and had free repair even if out of warranty.
The iMac cost like $3500 (corresponding local price), and the repair part was listed as costing $750 but given for free.
Another good experience is when they fixed a MBP (charging adapter) from free in a totally different country than the one purchased. Bought in Europe, fixed in an Apple Store in the US.
That said, the first case is 7 years ago, and the other is 6.
This is what an anti-competitive monopoly looks like. You cannot even choose where to get your laptop repaired, so there is no possibility for anyone else to offer, for example, a cheaper price for the labor. And the consumer pays the forcibly higher price. Those shops that attempted to offer cheaper repairs were retaliated against by Apple...
Lots of household appliances are similar to this too. If you have to repair one of the main parts of a washing machine or a dishwasher a new one will be a cheaper option.
Same for a car, a friend of mine flooded his engine by driving through water that was higher than expected. His insurance company just wrote the car off as it was much more expensive to replace an engine than to get a new car.
They didn't: they wrote the car off because it was flooded. That can ruin electrical systems, motors, pumps, engines, the body, and everything else the water touches.
In the US, when you contact your insurance company and say "I damaged my car driving it through water" and their appraisers agree, they're going to contact the state DMV and let them know. The DMV will mark your vehicle as flood damaged/impaired/salvaged. It's now worth the cost of scrap until you rebuild it to the satisfaction of your state laws to get a clean title.
The actual reason is they don't want Macbook components floating around on the grey market, so they make the pricing for significant repairs impossible to justify.
> This is not surprising at all, the retina screen is one of the most expensive parts of the laptop.
There is no way it costs them 2K to replace a retina screen in a 2K mac book.
Besides if Apple really wanted to they could create a more efficient and cheaper repair process for heavily damaged units. For example send them all to a central point, strip the working components and create refurbished units from those parts. For things on the outside (cover, plastics, etc.) you can use new ones because those will be scratched etc. And then give the customer the option to buy such a refurbished unit instead of a 2K screen replacement. As a bonus It's also better for the environment.
If you car is already out of warranty though, instead of scrapping it and taking whatever low ball value figure they give and buying another car, it may be cheaper to pay for the repair out of pocket elsewhere.
Filling the cylinders with water results in hydro locking an engine because the liquid cannot be compressed on the compression stroke. This can result in damaging the internal parts of the engine. Bent connecting rods are a common issue.
If you've gotten in deep enough to get water in through the intake manifold, it's quite likely that a great many other things that shouldn't be gotten wet have (wiring, interior, etc.) and it's not just the engine that will need to be replaced.
Essentially, this blog post reinforces the findings from the CBC and indicates that little has changed over the past few years regarding Apple's repair practices.
PowerBook Medic will replace the screen on a 15" Retina Pro for $449 USD. I'm sure smaller shops would do it even cheaper.
Lesson: treat your expensive electronics well. Or be like my brother with a permanent cracked screen on his iPhone.
Apple fan boys are very vocal and therfore help amplify the "Apple and Privacy" message way more than it is in reality.
If they are regulated, they can expect permanent life at the expense of taxpayers subsidizing the company.
Be extremely anti consumer and anti developer, advertise to make up for the negative behavior and loss of users.
They now loathe using it. These computers are so expensive. They seem to have a ton of issues with ridiculous repair costs.
What's going on? The keyboard issue from before is another example. Clearly they have the profit margin to ensure their products work well. And not charge unreasonable prices for repair.
If they 'recently got' it then it will still be in warranty and Apple will probably fix it for free.
https://youtu.be/iiCBYAP_Sgg?t=46
Not sure is the Pro is much better.
Source: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/363337/how-to-find...
The keyboard issues were really jarring precisely because Apple had, up to that point, a really great reliability reputation - in my experience, on par with the super-overengineered late-90s ThinkPads (IBM, not Lenovo).
I retired several PowerBooks and MacBooks at 6 or 7 years old that were still physically fine, but no longer appealing to use for Moore's Law reasons.
My wife's using my old 6 year old 13" Pro, and while I now find the keyboard weird, it's utterly capable of anything she needs to do with it -- which is pretty much a regular human duty cycle (ie, she's not running virtual servers on it like I was in its initial life).
We then passed on the small Air she'd been using for like 8 years; it's in daily use at a friend's house now as a spare platform (which turned out to be a big deal, given quarantine). My guess is that Intel Macs are about to hit a gate with the shift to ARM, and you won't be able to get 8 years out of one purchased in 2020, but I could be wrong about that. (I mean, I definitely am if you have relatively simple needs -- even if you get stuck at the last rev of Intel-friendly OS X, there's software for you there that will keep working.)
What actually did the trick - opening the case up, flushing the dust from both fans using compressed air, and replacing the thermal paste on the CPU & GPU. My MacBook is totally silent now.
I'm sure there is more than one possible root cause, but I feel this solution is not nearly as well known as it should be. Laptops generally run hot, and MacBooks have great fans, but they do trap dust. So there are a ton of people running around with old MacBooks which are being absolutely crippled by throttling. I ran some rough benchmarks and performance has approximately doubled. It's super noticeable.
IMO Apple is incentivised to do a poor job in highlighting this (and say, setting up a service program), because when your laptop starts to feel slow after a few years, people tend to feel like maybe it's time to buy a new laptop...
[1] https://www.gearslutz.com/board/music-computers/1322323-macb...
[2] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2017-15-mbp-fans-run-w-...
Now serious... first company with $2T valuation. Investors should be satisfied somehow.
I'm long time Apple user and fan. But their latest products are went to other direction are too fragile. Previous generations was undying!
If you have "infinite" prices in your mind (e.g. a Mac is always better than a Dell) a rational Apple is going to soak you for all your are worth and try to get you go into debt too.
First, there is the question of the right-to-repair and to what extent Apple is hostile to the existence of a viable second-party and third-party repair ecosystem, neutral to it, or actively supports it.
Second, there is the question of the relationship between the costs of the product and the costs of the things needed to repair the product, like replacement screens.
The two are not entirely orthogonal, because many strategies for reducing the costs of the product or increasing the utility of a working product have consequences with respect to the costs of components and the ease of third-party repair.
An example discussed on HN many times is the choice between user-removable batteries and building a battery in. When it's built-in, engineers have more options for miniaturization or increasing battery size and product life. The consequence, of course, is that batteries are now expensive to replace, and the batteries themselves are harder to get in a third-party ecosystem because there is little standardization: Every device might have a different battery optimized for that device.
If batteries were standard sizes as they are for many consumer devices with removable batteries, engineers have less flexibility to increase battery life, reduce weight, or reduce device size.
The same reasoning extends to replacing screens and keyboards. Supporting a vibrant and viable third-party ecosystem means making engineering compromises that have a distinct effect on the product's price and competitiveness in a world where every review discusses device weight, size, battery life, &tc.
The very best thing for a third-party repair ecosystem is to have fewer device-specific parts, fewer proprietary connectors, fewer components hard-wired into place, fewer components that change from device version to device version, &c.
The more different parts there are, the more that are introduced for a model or two and then discontinued, the harder it is for the viability of a third-party ecosystem with affordable options.
I feel that there's a deep and challenging tension between repairability and the immediate, out-of-the-box product value. In some industries, consumers value the ability to wrench their own product higher than in others. In bicycles, for example, there is a great deal of conservatism around engineering.
For all the bragging about new technology, the bicycle industry doesn't really advance very quickly. What do we have now, twelve-speed rear clusters? Whereas when I raced in the 80s, there were seven speeds back there. Whup-dee-doo, where are the internal gearboxes? And the other big innovations are disc brakes and electronic shifting? Compared to the advances in telephones, this is nearly nothing. When I had a mechanical seven-speed rear mech, I also had a physical phone hard-wired into my car. That was "mobile communications" back then.
I'm not defending Apple, it's up to everyone to decide for themselves which choices they think Apple should make. But we should accept that any choice for making things repairable has an impact on the out-of-the-box value of the device itself.
And if we want right-to-repair to be a viable and profitable business choice, something has to change about the marketplace itself, namely:
1. Get consumers to repair their devices far more often than they replace them, and;
2. Regulation.
I prefer regulation, personally. Yes, it's the bogeyman of "regulated marketplaces." But it also creates a level playing field, so that repairable devices do not have to suffer product reviews complaining about their price, weight, size, lack of differentiation from other devices sharing common standards, &c.
You need to provide it to users anyway.
Very few people will buy a more expensive, larger device that might be easier to repair or extend in a few years time.
Doing bespoke repairs in high labour cost countries is always expensive. More so when devices are small. It's probably cheaper to get a lower skilled worker to replace the whole board than a higher skilled worker to fix a board involving soldering that could cause further issues. Do we really think that it's going to be cost effective to take apart and fix airpods?
If you want something that is more easily repairable, extendable, and recyclable then a desktop/tower is the answer.
Macbooks are made in factories mostly by robots in large volume. Replacing part requires hard specialized manual labor and doesn't scale.
Thirdly, they are only asking for what people are willing to pay. My latest computer cost €205.
It is an extremely reasonable expectation that when a part of a laptop breaks or wears out, in most cases it should be possible to repair just that part. Not that you now have to throw out the whole laptop and buy a new one.
Yes, they are produced by robots at scale. But Apple designs the product. And design for maintainability is a key part of good design.
And they are not asking for what people are willing to pay. A reasonable user would not expect that a top-of-the-line laptop is completely unrepairable. Laptops have never worked like that. As such this would not be factored into the purchase price equation.